


Unlocked with "Dreaming Strange Dreams: A Game of Chess 17"

by Mithrigil



Category: Echo Bazaar
Genre: Mindfuck, Nightmares, North, Other, POV Second Person, Pastiche, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-09
Updated: 2010-08-09
Packaged: 2017-10-11 00:28:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/106232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithrigil/pseuds/Mithrigil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Say you turn over this card, and you expect your Nightmares to go up. Well, they probably will, but that doesn't mean you won't enjoy it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unlocked with "Dreaming Strange Dreams: A Game of Chess 17"

Copies of _Alice Through the Looking Glass_ have made it to the Neath, and if you have read them, you recognize this place. But this Palace of Hearts does not ascribe to a playing-card motif; the hearts, some still beating, are impaled on equally real spades, framing the fanciful topiaries with braided veins strung between as garden fences. If the clubs and diamonds are as real, they aren't as visible. The grass is shorn in even squares a body's-length long and wide, tilted half East-West and half South-North.

You look North.

The row of squares you stand on is the first; the column is left of center. You are either the Black King or the White Queen. The bodies, scattered but always one per square, are more red than either. There, you see, are the clubs and diamonds, buried in sightless eyes and clutched in impotent hands. You advance a square and nudge the corpse aside with your toe. A bishop died here. You cannot tell if it is yours.

A voice calls from across the pitch: "Check." It is an echo of your thoughts but the voice is multiple, deep and saturated. You stare up the field, search all angles for an opponent, but cannot see anyone still standing. You advance another square. This one is unoccupied. You breathe, and the shadow of a topiary encroaches, curls around behind you.

"Check."

Forward again: the slaughter here was awful, and its residual blood creeps up your shoes. You are certain that you are the King, the last of your colour. If the match cannot be stalemated, you have already lost.

Again the shadow rounds you. The topiary must be a knight, then, but its shape is not that of a human on an earthly horse. No voice calls Check this time, and you trip over the sacrifice pawns' remains trying to make the next square.

A branch, or an arm, or neither, reaches out and catches you. It clings to your chest like raw meat. You can feel its heat through layers of clothes.

"Concede," it says. Where a hand should be, a pronged mouth leers, flapping with three thin tongues like rat-tails.

You panic and struggle. The arm pushes back, and it or another takes you by the wrist on your weak side. Its heat sears your scars. Your blood is alive.

"Concede," it says again, two voices this time. A third hisses behind your knees. "If you do not concede, you will die. Once dead, you cannot leave me."

They wind around you, piecing out each arm, each leg, your neck, your waist. You cannot concentrate to count how many there are. Tongues coil around your fingers and down your shoes. The ground abandons you, or you abandon it.

One of the tentacles is level with your face. Its mouth is more flytrap than lips but you know it is smiling at you. Its tongues are eager curls behind the jagged bar of its fiber teeth. You know, just staring, that it is soft and wet and warm. It calls you by name and tells you again, "Concede." You can see it, feel it, shape every part of that word.

You have, somehow, the presence of mind to ask it how this is concession and not coercion. It does not let you finish the question.

As soon as your mouth is open its tongues plunge in, deeper than anything else you've ever taken. Its mouth is fastened over yours and god, you were right, it's warm as any kiss, filling and thick and thorough. You cannot help moaning any more than you can help gagging, and one leads to the other.

It cradles you, strokes you, tilts your head back to give you more. You strain and arch to stroke it, your own tongue short and inadequate. You taste blood, yours, but the creature has no taste, only insistent, penetrating heat.

It's under your clothes now, every cuff and every collar, licking at your joints. You hear cloth tearing and see, through the haloed slits of your eyes, just how many have climbed over you, writhing under your shirt like your own body is encasing another. You watch them breathe and tighten. You feel your muscles jump each time they lick you, grab you, test you.

Your back is soaked, flat against something strong and fleshlike. The tentacles have spread you and bared you and hold you now, still, and the ones you can see hovering before you are shining with hunger. Two are poised, licking their chops, at your groin. Something larger and hotter rocks against you from behind.

It wants you. You concede.

A dozen long tongues part you, and some push in, and you rock forward to offer yourself to the rest. You can feel them slavering, taking you down, swelling inside the same as you. It sucks you tight, strokes you with its teeth, slicks every straining patch of skin between your legs. You would shout if it was not thrusting down your throat. You probably do shout, but can barely feel it. God, it has you nearly everywhere, biting behind your knees, tonguing your chest, pulling your hair to position you around it just so. You thrust, you arch, you tremble, you beg. You give all it lets you and offer it more.

It tells you with every one of its mouths, "I want to fill you." For one confused moment you think it already has. You can feel every tongue, every tooth, every inhuman scale plumbing you inside and out. You throw back your head and widen your eyes and choke around its tongues, yes, _do it,_ for the love of God—

The force of it nearly tears you in twain. The mouths hold you apart like fingers and it sears you raw inside, one deep claiming thrust that nearly ends you right there, and if not for its arms and its mouths you know you would fall screaming. Oh, you do scream, but it keeps you aloft, plowing you with half its weight and forcing you back with the rest. Your knees buckle and clench around its mouths, your arms grope senselessly, you gape and groan and plead with it. More, you think you demand, and it obliges, rutting into you wherever you open and sucking you down where it opens for you. And where it can speak, it whispers, and gasps, makes its enjoyment and use of you clear as the light behind your eyes. It wants you. It _thanks_ you. It fucks you and drinks you until it's wrung you bruised and burnt, wet all over but dry inside and waiting only to be filled with it in the places it hasn't yet reached.

You scream for it. There may have been words, but you don't understand them.

It comes first, and all those places beyond its grasp flood white and sour and whole. Its tongues spend down your throat and all over your flesh, the walls of its mouths slick to the color of its teeth. Behind you and within you it bursts, a swarm of blinding heat, and the power and depth push the same out of you, into its waiting grasp. You ride through it, as if you need your whole body to keep drinking, keep holding what it's given you, and by the way it keeps working you forward and in it seems just as eager to take down yours.

Three by three, the tongues unwind and withdraw, only to lap up the intermingled trails of sweat and spend that soak your body. When your mouth is free your head lolls heavenward, mouth gasping without sound, as if it knows just how poor a substitute air is for what this has given you. Its heat has settled to an almost ticklish warmth, between the cold of the air and the flicker of its tongues, save for the one place it still remains inside you; and that place burns, not only for the stretch and the strain, but for the hope of more. Even after it lets you down, your feet uneasy on the checquered battlefield, you rock against the weight at your back.

You laugh, and so does it, but in only one voice. Something more like a neck than an arm curls over your weaker shoulder and nestles against your jaw. Its laughter is deeper and brusquer than yours. "A dignified defeat," it says, and cranes around to face you. You know, somehow, that it still points you North. "I will gladly keep you as my adversary."

The face of the Neath is grotesque, but had been human once. Its blind eyes, red on fractal black, glimmer with amusement, the warped reflection of its rows of teeth.


End file.
